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Fantastic Beasts Tops Box Office With $75 Million Debut

'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2' image courtesy of Universal

As we wait for the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice weekend numbers to roll in, this will be a look at the other two noteworthy openers debuting on this frame.

Batman v Superman didn't stop My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 from taking its own bite out of the weekend office. Nia Vardalos's sequel to her 2002 sleeper sensation earned 3,032% more on its opening weekend compared to the original! Yes, that's a record for that particular statistic. And now, with an $18.116 million debut, it's on track to make as much as $7.3 billion at the domestic box office! Okay, probably closer to $60m domestic, but let me have my fun for a moment.

Universal/Comcast Corp. took my advice and slotted My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 on this weekend as demographic counterprogramming, meaning that both of the big movies featured “strong” Greek women. I'd argue that I wanted Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman shout "Opa!" at some point, but "Opa" is a cry of joy and there is no joy or reason for celebration to be found in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But I digress. The $18 million sequel to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which brought back writer/star Nia Vardalos and the entire cast of the 2002 sleeper smash, just matched its production budget in the first three days of domestic release.

For those who came in late (and it's a great story, folks), My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a truly one-of-a-kind sensation fourteen years ago, opening on 109 screens with $597,000 and legging it for a year for a $241.43 million domestic total on a $5m budget. I talk a lot about opening weekend-to-final gross multipliers and how anything over 3x is pretty darn good, right? Well, My Big Fat Greek Wedding earned 404.1x its opening weekend, basically becoming the leggiest movie in modern history. Star Wars has made around 306.6x its $1.5m opening weekend over its entire 39-year lifespan.

And now, fourteen years later, audiences clearly were interested in another round of comedic family shenanigans. The Gold Circle/Playtone Pictures/HBO Films production will earn over its first three days just under the $19.3m the original film took eleven weekends to rake in. The film debuted in 3,133 locations, which is more than the 2,016 theaters that the original film played at its peak (weekend 26 of its year-long run). By the way, the best weekend the original ever had was an $11.1m Fri-Sun (and $14m Fri-Mon) Labor Day weekend gross on its 20th weekend.

Seriously the original run of this film is so contrary to anything about box office patterns that it still blows my mind. Regarding “decades-past” nostalgia plays, this both appealed to fans of the original movie and those who just wanted a family-friendly (its PG-13 rating is a joke) and adult-skewing female-centric comedy to see in theaters. There is a long history of studios finding success slotting smaller (often female-targeted) offerings against big (often male-targeted) blockbusters. Walt Disney's Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Sony's My Best Friend's Wedding, and Universal's Mama Mia! all opened just against various Batman movies over the last twenty-seven years. Universal had similar luck last December pitting Sisters against The Force Awakens.

The movie will play just fine for fans of the original (but will it get casual viewers properly excited for the My Big Fat Greek Wedding Extended Universe?), and between you and me it’s a superior picture to the first one. I have exactly zero idea how this film will do regarding legs, if only because Universal has Melissa McCarthy’s The Boss dropping in two weekends, and I will presume that Huntsman: Winter’s War (also Universal, that's a possible post for next week) will play bigger with women than with men. But considering it just out-grossed its production budget in three days, I wouldn’t sweat it. Offhand, let's just say 3x the weekend and give it a solid $55 million domestic total at this premature juncture.

Alas, this means it probably won’t become the first franchise installment to gross $200 million less than its immediate predecessor, maybe we can keep our fingers crossed for Star Wars 8, Avatar 2, or Jurassic World 2. Besides, if it has similar legs to the original, it will end its domestic run with $7,314,210,000 domestic. Which means that anything less than $4,525,000,000 will be considered a failure. A Failure! A FAILURE!!! A FAILURE!!! (echo, echo, echo!)

Speaking of Airplane! references, the only other major limited debut was I Saw the Light. Said Hank Williams biopic, starring Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen, was supposed to debut late last year before being deemed not-quite-Oscar worthy. And the reviews do bear that out, with mostly lousy notices and with any number of them referencing Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow’s Walk Hard.

Said 2007 cult film was, of course, a “Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker” style spoof of musical biopics (“Wrong kid died!"), and it would appear that I Saw the Light is a straight version of said satire.

The film earned $50,464 in five theaters. That gives the Sony Classics release a $10k per-location-average. I imagine this will expand just a bit to get fans of its biographical protagonist that live outside of New York and LA, so we’ll see how it plays outside film critic country. Speaking of ZAZ spoofs, if you haven't checked out Rashida Jones's TBS cop show comedy Angie Tribeca, you're missing out on some grand spoof-ery.